Bohemian Chatterer, From The Birds of America
John James Audubon, Artist
Photolithograph on paper
Printing: 1971-1972
Given by Martha Ann and David Fox, PHUMC Members
John Hames Audubon is best known for his ornithological magnum opus.
The Birds of America; from Original Drawings. Published between 1827-38
in an edition of around 200. The Birds of America represents the
culmination of Audubon’s life work as a naturalist artist, depicting in 435
plates every bird species from North America. In order to feature the birds
as life-size, Audubon insisted that the engravings were printed on “double
elephant” broadsheets measuring 39 ½ x 26 ½ or about twice the size of
the drawing paper on which he made the original watercolor studies.
Audubon’s path to becoming the world’s greatest bird painter was
circuitous, if not serendipitous. Born in 1785 in Les Cayes, Santo Domingo
(now Haiti), the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and his Creole
mistress, Jean-Jacques Fougere Audubon grew up in Nantes, France. It
was here that he developed his passion for birds, collecting countryside
specimens that he would stuff, display, and illustrate. To prevent his son’s
conscription in the Napoleonic Wars, Jean Audubon sent him in 1803 to a
farm he had recently purchased outside of Philadelphia, where young
Audubon (having anglicized his name to John James) preferred collecting
birds to running the family’s mining business. Five years later, Audubon
and his Pennsylvania bride, Lucy Blakewell, settled in Kentucky and he
cobbled together jobs as a merchant, miller, and portrait painter. At the
same time, he feverishly studied and rendered birds, creating a system of
suspending specimens from wires as a means of simulating lifelike poses.
His discovery of new bird species on trips during the early 1820’s through
Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida convinced him to compile an
illustrated book of native birds, despite his flimsy fortune and Lucy’s
hardship as the family breadwinner.
Unable to find a publisher in Philadelphia for his proposed book of bird
drawings, Audubon traveled to England and Scotland in 1826 in search of
support. Abroad, he met luminaries in the scientific community, including
the botanist Willam Roscoe, who helped him exhibit his drawings in
Manchester; the ornithologist William Swainson; the naturalist William
MacGillvray. who later edited the text for The Birds of America; and William
Home Lizars, an engraver in Edinburgh who, impressed by Audubon’s
work, agreed to print the massive folio. However, when Lizars was only
able to complete the first ten plates, Audubon approached the established
London engraver Robert Havell, who together with his son Robert, Jr. took up the project. Ultimately, The Birds of America was issued serially in five plate sets for a total of 435 plates, over the course of a decade.